Top Two Turnaround: Malaysia Analysis

Bumping into Ron Dennis on the grid in Malaysia, I passed the time of day by mentioning the recently surfaced rumours that Mercedes associate HWA wanted to buy into Toro Rosso. The McLaren boss said something about it being "cloud cuckoo land", so we switched instead to a brief discussion of the upcoming event.

Stating the obvious, I said it was absolutely vital that Fernando Alonso stayed between the Ferraris at the start if we were to get some kind of race. It was going to be a tough one in terms of the red cars' pace, Ron admitted, but "you never know about the first corner. It doesn't look like it's going to rain, does it?" he added.

"It'll probably come after the flag and dampen their celebrations," I said, before respectfully adding, "or yours for that matter..."

"Nothing will dampen ours!" he grinned, before wandering off for a final word with Lewis Hamilton.

A couple of hours later I remembered our exchange as I watched the beaming Dennis on the podium, looking every inch the proud father figure as Fernando Alonso and Hamilton took the plaudits. Ron neatly ducked away before the champagne started flowing, and came down the stairs just in time to see Hamilton's half-empty bottle slip through the fingers of a mechanic after Lewis passed it down from the podium.

The unfortunate fellow caught it on the first bounce, and yet the Mumm bottle didn't break. Ron couldn't help but joke about it with his guys, perhaps aware that here was further confirmation that this was a day when nothing that could go wrong actually did.

It was clear that despite the momentum that had built over the winter as the potential of the Alonso/Hamilton package became apparent, the sheer scale of the success had come as a welcome surprise even to the man who put the pieces into place.

"I'm proud for the team, above all else," he said as he walked away from the podium. "I'm obviously delighted with the result. Both drivers did an excellent job. We had a good strategy. Lewis was very controlled at the end, very cool, and did what was necessary to come second, which was his objective.

"I'm still basically letting it sink in. It was a great result. It was a good strategic race, and I think we showed we had the pace to beat the Ferraris, and I'm very pleased with the outcome, obviously. Inevitably you go through peaks and troughs of competitiveness, and hopefully this will be a trend that we can continue into the future."

Meanwhile, the glum faces in the Ferrari camp told their own story. In fact, this was the latest episode in an ongoing soap opera. Renault may have been the team to beat for the past couple of years, but since the Hakkinen/Schumacher days of 1998 F1 has largely been about McLaren v Ferrari, and during that time there have been an unusually large amount of races where the team that appeared dominant earlier in the weekend and into qualifying ended up losing on Sunday. So what happened this time?

Kimi pins the blame

That's a question that probably even the teams themselves can't answer with 100 percent accuracy, because the result was the product of a number of different factors coming together. Anyone trying to untangle it all also had to contend with Kimi Raikkonen's attempts to enlighten us in the post-race press conference, given the usual Ferrari constraints of not revealing too much too the media. Here's a sample of what he said:

"The whole weekend was quite difficult but I think we needed to compromise too many things and we lost too much speed because of those things."

"I think we know the reasons why we were not quick in this race, but unfortunately, as I said, we were in a position where we couldn't do anything else."

"We had to do some compromise as a team and so it cost us a little bit, maybe a bit too much in this race."

"We knew when we came here we had some handicaps."

"I think we knew that the engine was not 100 per cent and we had to be a bit on the safe side, but there were some other things, which were not perfect so we could not take risks to do anything stupid with what we had, so hopefully next race we can have all the right things in the car and be 100 percent again like in the first race."

It's worth considering that everyone's expectations had been fashioned by Australia. While it's fair to say that Ferrari also had a clear edge, there have been many Melbourne races where the advantage of the dominant team has, for some reason, been exaggerated (remember the huge margin the Williams pair had in 1997?). That gap quickly erodes once we move to more traditional circuits and everyone shakes away the winter cobwebs.

The interval of two weekends, and the chance to test in Malaysia, allowed McLaren to haul Ferrari in.

"I think hard work pays off," Martin Whitmarsh told me. "And I think the team and everyone in it works very hard. We knew we were there or thereabouts on qualifying pace, and I think we demonstrated that in Australia.

"We also knew in Australia that we were off on race pace, and we worked pretty hard on the car and on set-up, so the engineers and the guys in Woking worked hard to see what we could do about that. I think we've demonstrated that we've made reasonable progress."

Tyres: McLaren catches up?

Specifically, the team was able to come to terms with the tyres. Everyone might have been testing on the same tyres since November on an equitable basis, but there is no escaping the fact that Ferrari still has a huge amount of Bridgestone knowledge upon which it can call, and the others are still catching up. The Malaysia test allowed McLaren to close that gap.

"Clearly Fernando broke away," said Ron Dennis on Sunday afternoon. "And what was very encouraging for us is that the car got quicker, which means that we've come to grips with the issue of tyre degradation. As the fuel dropped out the car went quicker. That gives us some degree of confidence that we've come a bit closer to mastering the challenge of managing the Bridgestone tyre. That's possibly an edge that other teams have had. We felt we were second in that understanding, and we've got closer to the understanding, which should help us in the balance of the season.

"This is a very difficult sport to second-guess what will happen. We knew that we had closed the gap on them after Saturday. Qualifying with low fuel indicated that we had the ability to outpace them."

I bumped into Italian TV commentator Ivan Capelli in downtown Kuala Lumpur on Monday, and when we speculated upon Ferrari's fortunes, he opined that the Sepang testing had made a big difference. The fascinating thing is that everyone has also tested at the next two venues, Bahrain and Barcelona. After that comes one-off Monaco, but where things will really get interesting is in Montreal and Indy, when Ferrari has all that data to call on.

Indeed, as far as I know, after that the teams will only get to run at Silverstone, Monza and, if the July test really happens, Spa. McLaren's data bank of general Bridgestone knowledge will grow each weekend, but there will always be something specific to each venue that Ferrari knows, and the former Michelin runners don't.

Returning to Malaysia, the way the tyre usage in qualifying panned out was intriguing. Both Alonso (going for a time early in Q3 to beat the rain) and Massa (stymied by traffic) used an extra set of the option tyres (officially medium, but everyone used the shorthand soft). That meant they had no new soft sets left for the race.

While most people agreed that, at this race, over one stint it didn't make a lot of difference whether you had started on new or scrubbed ex-qualifying tyres, there is always an initial advantage off the grid and round the first few corners.

The two men in the leading group who had that bonus were Raikkonen and Hamilton, which doesn't explain Kimi's strange earlier comment, but perhaps does help us understand why Lewis was able to find grip that others couldn't on the tight inside line on the first turn, and the outside line on the second.

Alonso was so concerned about the lack of new soft tyres for the start that he actually considered starting on new hard tyres.

"The difference on the long runs between the prime and the option was very small," said test driver Pedro de la Rosa. "It was obvious that the option was quickest for qualifying, but on race pace until the last hour we didn't have a clear picture of which tyres Fernando would use, a used set of options or a new set of primes. He went for the used options. And on the last stint of the race Fernando with the prime was very quick. He liked the prime very much. So we were quick with both tyres."

Whitmarsh added: "After a result like this you think you got it right. And I think we probably did get it right. Fernando looked very, very comfortable on the prime at the end of the race, he looked very quick. Lewis looked less comfortable on the prime, which made the job he did at the end of the race even more startling, because it's very easy with that relentless pressure from Kimi coming at you to perhaps panic and get it wrong. And he got it spot-on."

Engines: Kimi's time bomb

The saga of Kimi's Melbourne winning engine - potentially damaged by the loss of water from a pipe - kept the media intrigued in the days prior to Melbourne. Ferrari kept us in the dark about what was really happening until Friday afternoon, and then basically accused the press of creating a drama out of nothing.

In fact, the team had decided some days previously that it would stick with the suspect engine. It had actually been flown back to Maranello, a highly unusual occurrence when freight would normally go straight from Oz to Malaysia. Subject to the usual restrictions of it being sealed by the FIA, the finest brains in Gilles Simon's engine department did everything they could to ascertain if it was OK - in fact around some 10 detailed tests and inspections, including the use of a static dyno, were undertaken.

Meanwhile, at the Malaysia test, another engine was tested on track with a similar loss of water simulated to provide useful data. The conclusion was that it was worth running the Melbourne engine come Sepang race weekend - but as gently as possible. The general feeling was that it would be better to take a punt and at least score some sensible points than take a guaranteed 10-place penalty.

Under the new Friday testing rules the two-race engine doesn't go back in until Saturday morning, so Kimi was not handicapped on Friday. On Saturday morning he very obviously took it easy, running only seven laps, fewer than half those of Massa, Alonso and Hamilton. The pattern of qualifying indicated that he perhaps wasn't even allowed to run it to 19,000rpm even then, for he got through the first two sessions in third and fourth, and was third when it mattered. Not bad, but it didn't exactly reflect his Melbourne form.

Come the race there is absolutely no doubt that he couldn't run the engine to its full potential, and that doesn't just mean the actual revs, but the way he had to drive to nurse the engine. There was no way he could ever be close enough at the end of either of the long straights to make a pass on a car of similar or slightly lesser performance.

The curious thing is that at the race speed trap (at the end of the back straight) Massa and Kimi were first and third, but considering both men spent most of the race behind other cars, those snapshot figures were probably influenced by tows.

More intriguing is the fact that Kimi was only ninth across the start/finish line, a speed that presumably reflects somewhat sluggish acceleration (and/or so-so traction) out of the last corner.

Ultimately the strategy of running the Melbourne engine paid off - third place was undoubtedly better than he would have achieved with a 10-place penalty, because he would have probably ended up in 14th or even worse had he gone into qualifying with anything like a suitable fuel load.

Of course, Kimi's very specific problem doesn't explain why Massa struggled to perform on Sunday. Don't forget, he had a new engine for the race in Melbourne, so it hadn't done the Saturday practice and qualifying mileage, and thus even without the leak situation it was potentially in better shape.

The issue of cooling could be part of the story. Malaysia is always one of the toughest tests of the year on engines, and with or without the Raikkonen concerns, Ferrari may have had to, in Kimi's words, make compromises to deal with that issue, possibly at the cost of drag and straight-line performance.

Ferrari engineering guru Luca Baldisserri denied that cooling was an issue, but a throwaway comment from Whitmarsh indicated that McLaren may have an advantage in this area: "The significant thing for me was that in these sorts of conditions a McLaren [Hamilton] was idling for three minutes at the end of the pitlane before Q3, which is not something that you would have seen us do before..."

Indeed, the Super Aguri engineers, who were situated directly opposite that end of the pits, were mightily impressed by the fact that the car sat there for so long with no air gushing through its radiators.

It's no secret that during the conversion to the new 19,000rpm era Mercedes made some significant gains, especially in the area of cooling requirements, which of course means there are aero benefits. Conveniently, Whitmarsh puts a figure of a quarter of a second a lap on it.

The rest of the story?

One Ferrari source said there was no great mystery to why Massa struggled to improve on fifth. Felipe was stuck behind a very motivated Nick Heidfeld, and even with a potential lap time advantage when running on his own, he simply didn't have a chance of getting past.

The way the strategies unfolded finished him off. As part of his quest for pole, Massa ran relatively light in Q3 and thus pitted on lap 17. BMW and Heidfeld confounded observers by going to lap 22, in total contrast to the team's Australian strategy (the team reverted to a more normal first stop because of the reduced risk of a safety car).

Already with a five-lap advantage, the team put enough in at the first stop to get Nick out still in front, and yet with a two-lap advantage over Massa at the second stop, which kept him ahead.

"We approached the race being a little bit aggressive in qualifying," said Baldisserri. "The start compromised this kind of race, so we were behind people with more fuel. That forced us to put, let's say, a little bit heavier car in the second stint.

"A heavier car here is a penalty, and that is a penalty that I think at the end of the day we most paid today. The car was not performing as Friday, the car was not performing as in the last test. We are analysing the data to understand why the package of car and tyres could not reproduce last week and Friday."

There's also a question of Felipe simply making the best of a bad situation. Throwing away a priceless pole on the first lap and then going off a few laps later is hardly calculated to boost your confidence, and to some degree he must have been driving to ensure that he at least brought home some points rather than trying any move on Heidfeld.

On Sunday evening Jean Todt and Baldisserri didn't really give much away, although Jean was at pains to point out that Kimi's engine handicap was worth "one tenth a lap" at most, although overall lap time and his inability to challenge Hamilton are two different considerations.

Helpfully, Massa himself added fuel to the speculative fire this week by saying that both cars had "parts" that had led to compromise (see news story). The mystery deepens.

Piling on the downforce

The aforementioned cooling issue might have been part of the story in terms of aero, but what were the other factors at play? One interesting factor concerns downforce levels.

Referring to the Bridgestone tyres, Dennis made an intriguing comment: "The thing that's difficult to know is just whether we've come to grips with handling the tyres. Today we did a better job in that area. We realised that we were going to have to sacrifice a bit of straight-line speed, slap a bit of downforce on, and take the hit in respect of outright performance."

That tallied nicely with a fascinating insight from Baldisserri on why his drivers ended up stuck behind other cars for so long. "This year the tyres have less grip than last year," he said. "So you need definitely more the help of the downforce in order to have a performance in the car.

"Staying behind the other cars, you pay downforce, and that is why I think this year we will see pay more (by) staying behind the other cars. That is one of the things that unfortunately, in the future, F1 has to address, because otherwise the spectacle will be what we have seen today."

In other words the two top teams had both agreed that to get the best out of the Bridgestones in Malaysia, and presumably to extend their useful life, you needed to add downforce. In the grand scheme of things, that may well have cost Ferrari more than McLaren, and even if it didn't, the general picture as described by Luca meant that Felipe and Kimi were never going to have a chance of making a pass.

Finally, it would be remiss not to mention the thorny issue of Ferrari's alleged flexing floor. There's no need to go into huge detail here once again, other than to say that the story appeared to sink without trace over the weekend, to the extent that a conspiracy theorist might think that something was afoot.

After McLaren sought a clarification from the FIA, Charlie Whiting confirmed that the test of the flexibility of the floor would henceforth be carried out without the stay in place. Most, if not all, teams had to take that into account to some degree. When I challenged Ferrari chief designer Aldo Costa about what the team had had to do, he merely said: "Some small detailed changes, but nothing fundamental, nothing that can affect the performance of the car."

In these sorts of circumstances, a team is hardly going to say anything else. There was nothing forthcoming from the FIA on the subject, as is always the case when technical interpretations are tweaked, and post-race even Ron Dennis played down the issue, in stark contrast to his bullish "just wait until Malaysia" approach to the subject he took in Australia.

Indeed, the issue disappeared under the carpet to such an extent that the refined test was not carried out on any cars on Thursday, Friday or Saturday. The official post-race FIA scrutineering report did not make any specific mention of the test being carried out, and it may well be that the threat was enough to do the job. During the weekend all teams used the FIA's own equipment to conduct their own private tests, and therefore were pretty confident that they were within the required parameters.

However, did the need to pass the revamped test, possibly with a temporary fix conducted while the team was 'on the road', really rein in Ferrari - at least relative to the Melbourne status quo?

Intriguingly, someone who should understand these things suggested that any advantage from a 'suspect' floor, if at all, was not to do with creating a stall and improving straight-line speed - it was more likely to involve improved stability and performance under braking and on corner entry. Just don't expect any detailed explanation from Maranello any time soon!

Much of the above is theory, but the bottom line is that on the day, the McLaren drivers did the better job. Alonso and Hamilton made a nonsense of the qualifying with their starts and runs round the first couple of turns, to the extent that henceforth the team might be prepared to stick a few laps more fuel in the cars (or at least Lewis's), risk losing out to the Ferraris in qualifying, and yet have the perfect 'double whammy' race strategy - either get ahead of them anyway at the start thanks to Hamilton's virtuosity, or sit behind them until they pit, and cruise past after the first stops.

"At the moment there's a reasonably small margin between ourselves and Ferrari," said Whitmarsh. "And I think it will continue to be a good battle between us. The strategy was good, the starts were fantastic, the job that Lewis did was great.

"Fernando, frankly, was driving within himself from a third of the way through. I think there will be a lot of superlatives written about Lewis, and they're absolutely justified, but we really just have to recognise that Fernando is that lean, mean killing machine. He just gets on and does the job.

"He did a fantastic job all weekend. Looking at what Fernando did in Q2, that second sector time was incredible. I think he and the engineers worked hard to get the car where he wanted. We don't know Fernando well yet, but it's the first time I'd ever heard him get out of the car and say 'the car is perfect, don't touch it'. I don't think he's prone to saying those things frequently. At that point we knew we had a fairly good race car to go out there and see if we could get the job done."

We've got a real contest on our hands. Bahrain will be fun...

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- The Autosport.com Team

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